Pony.ai's Driverless Uber: A Step Forward for AI in China

Our 205th episode with a summary and discussion of last week's big AI news!
Recorded on 03/28/2025

Hosted by Andrey Kurenkov and Jeremie Harris.
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In this episode:

• OpenAI's new image generation capabilities represent significant advancements in AI tools, showcasing impressive benchmarks and multimodal functionalities.
• OpenAI is finalizing a historic $40 billion funding round led by SoftBank, and Sam Altman shifts focus to technical direction while COO Brad Lightcap takes on more operational responsibilities.,
• Anthropic unveils groundbreaking interpretability research, introducing cross-layer tracers and showcasing deep insights into model reasoning through applications on Claude 3.5.
• New challenging benchmarks such as ARC AGI 2 and complex Sudoku variations aim to push the boundaries of reasoning and problem-solving capabilities in AI models.

Timestamps + Links:

• (00:00:00) Intro / Banter
• (00:01:01) News Preview
• Tools & Apps

• (00:02:46) Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model
• (00:08:41) OpenAI rolls out image generation powered by GPT-4o to ChatGPT
• (00:16:14) Ideogram presents version 3.0 of its AI image generation system
• (00:19:20) New Reve Image Generator Beats AI Art Heavyweights MidJourney and Flux at a Penny Per Image
• (00:21:56) Alibaba Releases Qwen2.5 Omni, Adds Voice and Video Modes to Qwen Chat
• (00:23:58) The official version of Tencent's Hunyuan Deep Thinking Model T1 is here, with fast articulation, instant responses, and a decoding speed increase of 2 times

• Applications & Business

• (00:25:45) OpenAI Close to Finalizing $40 Billion SoftBank-Led Funding
• (00:29:26) OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus
• (00:33:23) Nvidia shows off Rubin Ultra with 600,000-Watt Kyber racks and infrastructure, coming in 2027
• (00:35:23) China's SiCarrier emerges as challenger to ASML, other chip tool titans
• (00:38:24) Pony.ai wins first permit for fully driverless taxi operation in the center of China’s Silicon Valley

• Projects & Open Source

• (00:40:27) A new, challenging AGI test stumps most AI models
• (00:45:16) Challenging the Boundaries of Reasoning: An Olympiad-Level Math Benchmark for Large Language Models
• (00:48:13) Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models
• (00:50:38) DeepSeek V3-0324 tops non-reasoning AI models in open-source first
• (00:54:46) OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data

• Research & Advancements

• (00:55:56) Anthropic can now track the bizarre inner workings of a large language model
• (01:06:00) Chain-of-Tools: Utilizing Massive Unseen Tools in the CoT Reasoning of Frozen Language Models
• (01:11:50) Inside-Out: Hidden Factual Knowledge in LLMs
• (01:15:14) Sakana AI super-powers AI reasoning using Japan’s own Sudoku Puzzles

• Policy & Safety
  
  
• (01:18:38) Senator Wiener Introduces Legislation to Protect AI Whistleblowers & Boost Responsible AI Development
• (01:21:50) NVIDIA & Other Tech Giants Demand Trump Administration To Reconsider “AI Diffusion” Policy Which Is Set To Be Effective By May 15
• (01:23:17) U.S. blacklists over 50 Chinese companies in bid to curb Beijing's AI, chip capabilities
• (01:26:44) Netflix’s Reed Hastings Gives $50 Million to Bowdoin for A.I. Program

• (01:27:55) Judge allows 'New York Times' copyright case against OpenAI to go forward
• (01:29:48) Judge rules that AI can continue training on copyrighted lyrics, for now